The growing Environment and Sustainability list is at the heart of our remit to publish quality scholarship that addresses global social challenges.
This list covers a broad spectrum of issues and focuses on the social justice dimensions of environmental sustainability, including in: climate change, environmental politics, developing sustainable economies, transport and sustainability and environmentalist thought and ideology.
The new open access Global Social Challenges Journal incorporates these themes to facilitate critical thinking across disciplines and fields.
Environment and Sustainability
This article explores the transformative potential of improvisational techniques in reshaping interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary (ITD) learning environments offering art-based exercises and tools for this work. By integrating active research with improvisational methods from theatre and music, we propose a pedagogical shift that transcends traditional academic roles and disciplinary boundaries, fostering a culture of co-creation, mutual learning and innovation. This approach aims to tackle the inherent challenges of ITD research and thus enhance ITD research groups’ ability to address complex societal ‘Grand Challenges’. We argue that improvisation within both ITD research and educational communities serves as a crucial catalyst for nurturing trust, embracing failure as a growth opportunity, and redefining success. Embodied practices based on improvisation help bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical applications, enabling academics to navigate the complexities of collaboration and engage in shared learning experiences. This article introduces techniques from improvisational theatre aimed at fostering trust and collaboration in transdisciplinary research and educational settings. Drawing on over 25 years of combined research experience, we show how these tools enhance mutual understanding and collective problem-solving among students and research teams. Ultimately, we advocate integrating conventional knowledge delivery models with a framework characterised by regenerative practices, care and explorative processes. This integrated approach would offer new opportunities for addressing the intertwined wicked problems our world faces today, promoting a more inclusive, participatory and creatively fulfilling academic community.
Introduction:
Sexual and reproductive health (SRH) is an important global health issue linked to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Adolescents in refugee settings face specific SRH needs and risks, and limited access to needed services. This research, therefore, aimed to develop an understanding of SRH needs of, and risks to, adolescent refugees, to inform adolescent sexual and reproductive health policies and programmes.
Methodology:
The study employed qualitative approaches. Seventeen in-depth interviews were conducted with adolescent refugees and nine key informant interviews with stakeholders, including representatives from NGOs, health facility workers and refugee leaders. We performed content and thematic analysis drawing on the ecological systems theory framework.
Findings:
Reproductive health issues presented by adolescent refugees included menstruation supplies, reproductive health education and contraception. Participants reported several reproductive health risk factors that include risky sexual relationships, child abuse in homes, early marriage, teenage pregnancies and forced marriage, and sexual and gender-based violence.
Conclusion:
The findings highlight significant gaps in adolescent refugees’ knowledge and access to SRH services. These gaps are shaped by cultural norms, limited service availability, and lack of targeted SRH education for young people in refugee settings.
Recommendation:
Targeted training is vital to guaranteeing efficient delivery of SRH services; with humanitarian organisations ensuring their personnel is appropriately trained to support adolescent refugees and their SRH needs. Culturally appropriate services are required to ensure greater buy-in and build trusting relationships with the population.
Violence against women and girls (VAWG) has been at the forefront of feminist struggles for equality; however, movements to prevent VAWG have been depoliticised, particularly by Western voices, with processes rooted in colonialism and patriarchy. Despite a growing movement to decolonise violence prevention and centre voices and experiences of the Global South, many continue to navigate power-imbalanced partnerships. To dismantle power imbalances within North–South and South–South collaborations, it is necessary to reflect on positionalities and ‘power within’, explore deep structures of partnership models, technical assistance and funding mechanisms, and collectively harness the ‘power to’ create systems promoting trust, mutual learning and accountability.
We conducted a qualitative retrospective and prospective, multi-site case study to generate evidence on effective technical assistance and partnership models for adapting and scaling VAWG prevention programmes and contribute to discussions on feminist funding approaches and devolution of funder power. We examined partnership models and power dynamics among funders, programme designers and implementers involved in adapting Program H (Lebanon), Take Back the Tech Campaign (Mexico), Safetipin (South Africa), Legal Promoters Training and Community Care Model (Cape Verde) and Transforming Masculinities (Nigeria). This provocation builds upon findings from this research by offering first-person reflections from some members of the study team, Study Advisory Board and study participants. Authors respond to provocative statements by drawing upon experiences from this study and other projects for how funders, programme implementers and researchers can better work together to accelerate efforts to achieve social and gender justice within and beyond the violence prevention field.
Actors working on global climate and sustainability challenges are faced with two competing imperatives: first, there is an ever-expanding body of knowledge, networks and initiatives generating new insights that should be shared. Second, we see a growing recognition that fly-in, fly-out conferencing practices are an insufficient and unsustainable model for learning, boundary crossing and collaboration towards sustainability transformations. Against this backdrop, we argue that knowledge exchange for societal transformations needs to consider three interrelated dimensions: (1) equity and inclusion – access to and representation in both process and content for all, (2) low carbon – limits the ecological burden produced by the exchange, and (3) impact – outcomes at individual and collective levels that enhance our ability to act. How we navigate the tensions that may emerge from these dimensions is a matter of pressing importance. This research article examines the potential of multi-sited dialogues as an approach to co-producing transdisciplinary solutions by using the three dimensions as the analytical framework. We report on a series of dialogue-focused conference sessions convened at three international conferences in 2023. Our findings describe the contributions that the multi-sited dialogue process brought to knowledge co-production across space and time, and the contribution of facilitation practices to the outcomes of these dialogues. We also introduce and discuss the set of principles for transforming sustainable conferencing practices that were co-produced over the three dialogues.
This article explores the pedagogical affect of water in a place of water stress and illustrates its entanglement with dynamics of power and control. The current climate crisis is rendering already drought-prone regions ever drier, and it is often the already socially and economically disadvantaged who experience the most immediate impacts. In this article, we describe the experiences of residents in one township in South Africa’s Cape Flats to explore how water literacies have developed and been reinforced by a prolonged period of water scarcity. By analysing assemblages of images and accompanying texts produced through a PhotoVoice process undertaken by co-researchers in this settlement, we show how water’s presence as an always imminent absence has profound pedagogical impact. We also explore how water manages to escape and flow outside of attempts to control and constrain it. Finally, we speculate on the implications for place-based water literacies and the pedagogies at work in other places of water stress.
This piece elaborates on a ‘new way of thinking’ (Einstein, 1946) that would contribute to overcoming the challenge of climate change and its impacts. This ‘new way’ will have us go beyond using facts and figures alone to persuade and cajole. It will have us stretching our moral imagination (Johnson, 2016) and empathising with people very different from ourselves. It will have us investing in processes of exchange which support the co-creation of knowledge and the future we want together.
This article offers a critical approach towards adopting new technologies as a mitigation strategy. It provides a comprehensive analysis that helps illuminate the adoption process and the sociocultural factors intersecting and informing it. Using a capability approach lens and qualitative and participatory data collection methods, this study presents and analyses the testimonies of smallholders living on Colombia’s Pacific coast, currently exposed to a series of interventions that promote changes in production decisions to contribute to reducing national greenhouse gas emissions. Specifically, improved forages, silvopastoral systems and new practices, such as the implementation of rotational pasturing, have been promoted as relevant new approaches. The results show that access to new technologies generates new capabilities, for instance the ability to plan for the challenges imposed by climate change or to develop new strategies to allow the soil to recover naturally. However, these new possibilities are unevenly distributed, creating disadvantages for groups that generally experience conditions of vulnerability, such as young farmers and women. The testimonies also show that many of the promoted initiatives emphasise the need for adaptation and change on the part of smallholders without considering the limitations of technology, the gender issues that affect the inclusion of women and the dynamics that set barriers to young smallholders due to economic restrictions or power issues. Therefore, the study contends that, when understanding technology adoption, it is not only a question of what farmers do or do not do but of what they can be and do in increasingly demanding contexts.
The distinctiveness of urban processes and dynamics in Africa are of global significance. Achieving sustainable transitions in African cities must necessarily engage with theory and practice, which are derived out of context, and applied in systems and structures that are not globally understood. As sites of knowledge production, universities on the continent have a key role to play in addressing Sustainable Development Goal 11, which seeks to make cities sustainable. The ‘third mission’ of universities, which involves shaping societal benefits, extends their traditional mandates of research and higher education teaching beyond and across academic disciplines, to engage in local and global partnerships. Evidence from a range of knowledge co-production programmes anchored at African universities show that transdisciplinary approaches have made positive contributions to society. With the goal of realising the full potential of sustainability transitions, a network of scholars convened around a series of workshops to understand and enhance the effectiveness of the New African Urban University. Through processes of knowledge exchange, the network showed that realising the full potential is hampered by challenges of working across and beyond disciplines, highlighting the structural and systemic shifts required within African universities. Furthermore, partnering across the Global North and South in international transdisciplinary programmes is beset by power dynamics that shape assumptions and practices based on universalised assumptions about both theory and practice. This article outlines dimensions of an agenda to inform a more global and inclusive positioning of African universities as agents of social change.
The notion of the Anthropocene has become a popular (and contested) term to describe the times we live in; among other things, it alerts us to the damage mainstream Western-centred anthropocentrism has wreaked on nature: in so doing, the Anthropocene signals that for life as we know it to continue, a more sustainable relationship with nature must be urgently implemented.
The article will discuss a project that emerged as part of a teacher education programme in the UK where selected insights elaborated by Donna Haraway have been used to inform a Bee Hotel project. The resulting ‘Harawayan’ Bee Hotel (HBH) was used as a catalyst to help trainee teachers to both blend climate education into the standard curriculum to be delivered during their placements and, importantly, to introduce them to a new conceptualisation of nature. Specifically, trainee teachers were presented with, and encouraged to integrate into their teaching practices, a vision of nature that recognises and respects its uniqueness, agency and worth, and that accepts that some level of ecological instrumentalisation and destruction is necessary for human life.
The article will argue that the HBH acts as a microcosm where it is possible to forge and practice, for both present and future generations, an ethics that encourages the establishment of a respectful relationship with nature, facilitating the meeting of SDGs and offering the thinking tools to go beyond them.
